Location by Incentives
A lot of people wonder why data centers aren’t built only at the arctic and antarctic circles to take advantage of year-round free cooling. The answer, in a word, is incentives. When looking more indepth, a few words behind that are taxes and power costs. The cost of power is one of the strongest reasons behind […]
Take Advantage of DCIM
Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools have had a number of approaches to save data center managers time, money and uptime. While the different tools have come from different directions in the industry, such as facilities or communications, the tools themselves are all performing well when used as intended. Managing assets, capacity, change, power, energy, and […]
Water Issues of the Southwest USA
It seems that there are reports about the dire water conditions of the Southwest United States at least once a month. Each state is vying for more water use to support their agriculture, domestic, and power needs. Water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell have dropped enormously and evidence of this can be readily seen […]
Purge those Unused Servers
In many data centers the motto is to leave servers where they are until the owner or manager of it requests a change. This is a common practice of supporting processes and applications with dedicated, unvirtualized servers that may or may not be performing work. Then, add to this that most IT groups and data […]
Liquid Cooling Definitions
The majority of the industry understands that liquids are used in some or most of the cooling process for most data centers. However there has been some misunderstandings about what is actually liquid cooled. ASHRAE (the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Engineers) released the second edition of Liquid Cooling Guidelines for Datacom Equipment […]
Digital Growth of the Health-Care Industry
Despite some of the recent scares with security, the health-care industry is having a data explosion that is continuing to grow. With the future expectation of access to health data on demand, the storage and retrieval will continue to push both data centers and online security providers. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical […]
Environments to be Monitored
Monitoring a data center is an important part of managing how it operates and making decisions for the future. Knowing what is important to measure and monitor is crucial, as the deluge of information and misleading metrics can begin to lead you astray. About one in three facilities will have an outage of four hours […]
Choosing a Contractor
There are many clients who are now taking on projects small and large and getting the right contractor can lead to a successful project outcome. Here are a few of the key items to consider. Expertise: choosing a good contractor isn’t enough if the contractor isn’t good with critical facilities and data centers. Their terms […]
Better Modeling, Better Results
Modeling your data center using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can help get a better picture of the data center performance, hot spots, air flows, pressures and more. There are natural concerns about the cost, complexity, and how a CFD can compliment your floor design and work with your Data Center Information Management (DCIM) tools. CFD […]
Lights Out
Lighting in the data center has been a target in data centers for a while, as they can have upwards of 1.5 watts per square foot of white space. While this power density may seem small by comparison with the computing loads, any lighting with over 1.0 watts per square foot is likely higher than […]